Elias Laurin Meyer awarded by Austrian Statistical Society

Elias Laurin Meyer, PhD graduate of MedUni Vienna, has been awarded the prize for the best dissertation in applied statistics by the Austrian Statistical Society for his dissertation written at the Institute of Medical Statistics at the Medical University of Vienna. He received the prize for his thesis "Designing exploratory platform trials", which was supervised by Franz König. Modern medical research faces complex challenges in the development of new therapies. As a result of the desire to generate more robust evidence for evaluating the safety and efficacy of therapies while simultaneously increasing efficiency in testing, some established paradigms of drug development have been scrutinized and so-called platform trials have become increasingly popular. Platform trials are studies that investigate multiple treatments within the context of a single disease, with the exceptional feature of being able to run indefinitely and allow additional treatments and new substudies to enter or exit the study over time. Platform trials have distinct strengths, including adaptive design elements, the testing of multiple treatments within a single study, faster decision-making, seamless integration of new treatments into the ongoing study, enhanced comparability through standardization, and opportunities for collaboration among different consortia/companies. In the award-winning work, completed as part of the EU-PEARL project (https://eu-pearl.eu/), Elias Laurin Meyer first examines the evolution of platform trials, including software for simulating these study designs, in two systematic reviews.